Switzerland’s underground freight project gets start date

Just a guess, but maybe it's just a good starting point. 30kmh is pretty quick for moving goods (if you factor in all the downtime that goods spend in warehouses) and is also not terribly hard to deal with in terms of designing the system and the traction engines. When you combine this with the fact that the density can be higher than with human drivers, 30kmh doesn't seem so bad.

Plus I would think they could gradually increase the speed as the system proves itself more. There are so many other challenges with getting this done, that maybe making the system go as fast as possible took a backburner.

I know nothing about this project and probably shouldn't comment but from previous logistics projects I've worked on I've learned that maintenance costs from wear and tear all seem to increase non-linearly with mechanical speed. An everyday example is that some buildings choose to run their elevators at slower speeds for this reason, but the speeds of industrial and logistical conveyor belts are carefully chosen with this in mind too. Of course air resistance also goes up non-linearly with speed, and that might be a factor here.

They're probably optimizing for consistent throughout rather than latency. Faster vehicles would reduce latency but increases the risk that a breakdown would knock out some of the capacity. (And with an underground network it's not so easy to pull off onto a side street!)

From some googling, average freight speed in the US is under 40km hour. And that includes huge stretches of track without a curve or a mole hill. The capacity limitations end up at the depots anyway so going faster just means hurry up and wait.

Its all about energy. Accelerating the cars up to speed is one thing, but slowing them down and negotiating corners is another. Whether you use batteries or diesel, speed always takes more energy. As for throughput, we need to know the safe distance between these things at various speeds. Just like on roadways, they need to be able to stop if the car/train ahead of them stops. So slower cars, closer together, probably result in more cars passing per second than at higher speeds with greater stopping distances between cars. Exactly the same as with roads.

Anyone who thinks that because these things are automated that they can safely travel bumper-to-bumper at high speeds hasn't worked with vehicles underground before. Any pileup in a tunnel is a nightmare. Something burning, especially something high-energy like butter or flour, turns the tunnel into a blast furnace. Safety distances will always be required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Blanc_tunnel_fire

>>On the morning of 24 March 1999, 39 people died when a Belgian transport truck carrying flour and margarine, which had entered the French-side portal, caught fire in the tunnel.

Is there any benefit to going faster? 30km/hour gets you anywhere in Switzerland in less than 24 hours.

I was also suprised they couldn't go faster. Maybe energy efficiency? That is the only reason you would go slower. Maybe they are trying to make this thing hyper-efficient energy wise.

But this project is awesome for two reasons: one, I've always wondered why this sort of thing isn't automated. We could even have humans moving small packages intra-city underground on conveyor belts.

And two, I live in Zurich, so being close to what I believe is the first project of this type ever, is super cool.

Based on my extensive experience on factory building games I would suggest that perhaps also in real world wreight transfer, latency doesn't matter, only throughput.

It seems to be last mile distribution from logistical centers, so targeting rather short distances given the size of the country and distribution of large cities.

First segment is between on of the biggest logistical hub and Zurich (largest city), which are 70km apart.

Given this is goods and not people the more relevant metric is not the average speed of the carts but the volumetric flow rate at each of the nodes in this system.

Imagine you ordered something from Amazon. It will take about 24 hours till it is at your doorstep. If all that time was spent travelling at 30 km/h, it could have come from 720 km or 450 miles.

In Switzerland, the distance from Geneva to St. Gall is around 360 km.

Container ships travel typically at 16 to 25 knots (between 30 and 36 km/h), and they do this traveling very long distances.

In other words, low speed does not really matter for many goods, especially in small countries.

The total throughout (in cars/hour) is given by speed divided by effective length.

Effective length is the length of a carriage plus its share of the distance between trains, which is something like quadratic in speed (since kinetic energy also is)

So the total result is something (caution, probably there are other factors here, such as non-carrying cars like locomotives) like:

          v
 TP = ----------
           Kv^2
       L + ----
            N

Where TP is throughput, v is speed, L is car length, N is cars per train and K is some constant that determines the head between trains.

To maximise throughput, you can't just crank up speed as you start to dominate the line with space between trains (as kV^2 grows). There will be a sweet spot when it is optimum. This applies as long as the braking distance of a train is super-linear, actually, so even if the distance is not quadratic in speed, say it was Kv^1.5, it still holds.

You can make trains longer (increase N) to reduce the number of spaces between trains. But this has its own practical issues.

You can also decrease K with better brakes or sensors that allow to brake earlier. But I imagine there's either a practical limit like forces on the tracks or trains, cost too much, or trains have what they have and can't be upgraded.

You can also make cars hold more per unit length, but that's also difficult in a fixed guage in tunnels.

Finally, if you're running trains as close as you can, there's no point running faster then the slowest train in the system. If a train at any point has to slow to 30kph, say for a corner or climb, that's the speed of the whole line.

> Anyone able to comment on why 30km hour was targeted for the high capacity lanes?

Maybe because it's a good start?

And what matters for a project like this is throughput, of which speed is but a single component, uninterrupted flow and volume being others.

That is not simple math, that is lying by omission. Trucks only drive 80km/h so talking about 120km/h either makes you sound like an elementary schooler or an Elon Musk fanboy.

Also, they're also expanding the rail tunnels as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRLA

That's how Swiss politics work. If you can get 100000 voters to sign a petition it triggers a referendum. And that's basically how any opposition to such a project is expected to proceed.

If the parliament passes something that you don't want, you can collect 50'000 signatures and challenges the decision. If you managed to collect these signatures, then the law will voted by the whole population in the next votation (we have like 3-4 votations per year).

On the other hand, if you want to propose a law, you can collect 100'000 signatures and create an "initiative". After evaluation of the feasibility of this law, it will be the subject of a nation-wide votation.

correction: It's a referendum (oppose a law enacted by the parliament), so you need to collect 50 000 signatures. For a petition (changing the consitituion) you need 100 000. However, the vote in the parliament was quite clear. For example, in the Ständerat 43:0, so it would have been a surprise if a referendum were launched. Swiss politics is not consensus-based. However, you don't have just two parties that oppose each other. As most parties somehow play part in the government (some more, some less), destructive behavior is frowned upon unlike in other countries. That's why maybe some think it's consensus-based. Furthermore, due to the strong federal system and general culture, minorities need to be considered. Moreover, Switzerland is a small country, which makes some behavior difficult (see also destructive behavior above).

Not sure exactly what you're asking, and also not from Switzerland, but what I can comment on is the fact that IIRC correctly, it is fairly easy to launch a "referendum" in Switzerland, i.e. something (a new law, or the overturning of one, or a project like this being canned) to be submitted to a direct vote from the entire population.

Here’s the official information provided by the Swiss authorities related to political rights of referendums, petitions, and right to vote, which is a filter for participation:

https://www.ch.ch/en/political-system/political-rights/

List of similar projects is listed here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway#S...

One in London is now a tourist attraction.

I was thinking the same. Why not just a railway?

The Swiss are building those too: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/trans-alpine-rail-tunnels...

Being sandwiched between Germany, Austria, France and Italy, Switzerland gets a lot of transit traffic. At this point, nothing is really off the table to deal with it.

All changes impact nature, only questions of how much, what’s impact, etc — and my guess in the impact of tunnels is poorly understood. While not tunnels, hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") to known to increase earthquakes. Another likely impact would be any vibrations that reach any organisms able to sense them, which might in turn change the behavior on organisms above the ground.

Those numbers surprise me. I know it is a lot of money but honestly I would have expected underground infrastructure like that to cost a lot more. Maybe it is a regional thing.

Its Switzerland, so I'd assume the mountains and snow play a big part in increasing the cost of surface road building and snow clearing, making tunnels more attractive.

Since this is in Switzerland, an overland route will require a lot of ups/downs over all their mountainous terrain. A tunnel can be made to slope much more gradually, which will increase the efficiency of the system. In addition, Switzerland has a lot of experience with building tunnels, so it's probably not quite as costly as it could be.

Utility tunnels are pretty cheap. When you don't need stations or safety systems for human passengers tunnels get pretty cheap.

There isn't that much free land for new tracks, plus mountains everywhere. If any country anywhere called for an underground network, it would be Switzerland.

Private land ownership - since we don't talk about China but very strong democracy, state can't really just come and take piece of land (often cut through fields), and have terminals cut through already densely populated cities.

1 farmer not agreeing in some crucial placement would cancel whole part of network. And buying up so much land could easily be more costly here rather than just digging up rather simple narrow long tube.

Switzerland is dense enough that if you go underground "only where needed"... you end up underground.

If it's supposed to be some sort of last-mile "packet switching" thing akin the per-factory spurs I suppose that is fine and interesting, but I'm very unsure from the website whether there is that sort of intent.

Swiss in general have their shit very together on system integration so fingers cross they are doing it, and not importing American shiny-new-thing fetishization and dysfunction.

You likely haven't travelled our rail system a lot. Only major train stations have the capacity to handle large volume goods, the far majority of train stations is to small and has no way to grow (because of property, mountains, geography, ..)

Also, I don't know exact numbers, but it's likely to assume that more goods need transport in future as well as more people are going to use trains. The capacity is limited, especially in a system that works so well because it has so little delays as well as a whole fallback network.

Pretty sure if they start doubling the freight capacity we will start to see more delays for normal train travel, which is literally the last thing they want to see happen

I have had the pleasure of living/working in Switzerland and transportation there is fairly impressive. They are also a very rich country which gives them the option to seek the development of long-term projects that may one day benefit them as opposed to immediate fixes to issues they are having at the moment.

If this works, it would be quite beneficial. Cities with less visible vehicles and streets would be healthier for the population.

Härkingen is well-known for being at the crossroads of important highways, FWIW. It is definitely a very relevant location for logistics.

Every single person in Switzerland that listens to traffic reports recognises the name of that 5k inhabitant village. The A1 highway section there is one of Switzerlands most congested roads. Also, it is the location of Swiss Posts largest distribution centers, which alone makes it a significant logistics hub already. But adding to that it is also home to the flagship distribution center of Migros and hubs of several other large Swiss logistics firms like Planzer and Emil Egger.

So, I think creating a connection from there to Zurich will be just fine. They chose that first route for a reason.

>some 5k inhabitant village I'd never heard of

Chicago and Los Angeles were ~5k pop backwaters before becoming railway hubs.